RUSSIAN POSTMODERNISM: AN OXYMORON? by MARJORIE PERLOFF Stanford University 0004221898@mcimail.com _Postmodern Culture_ v.3 n.2 (January, 1993) Copyright (c) 1993 by Marjorie Perloff, all rights reserved. This text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. [1] In the wake, first of %perestroika%, and now of the wholesale dissolution of the Soviet Union, the temptation has been great to align the "new Russian poetry" with its American postmodernist counterpart. And since the poets who have taken the most active role in translating this hitherto %samizdat% poetry are those associated with the Language movement, most notably Lyn Hejinian, Michael Palmer, and Jean Day, as well as Hejinian's collaborators (Michael Davidson, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten) on the extraordinary travel book _Leningrad_ (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1991), there is naturally a feeling on the part of the Russian poets themselves that there are serious links between the Russian and the American postmodernist avant-garde, whatever these much contested terms really mean. At a reading at New Langton Street last year, for example, when the question was put to Alexei Parshchikov and Ivan Zhdanov, "What American poets have influenced your work?" the immediate reply, I believe from Parshchikov, was "the language poets." The same point is made by Andrew Wachtel and Parshchikov in their Introduction to Kent Johnson and Stephen M. Ashby's new anthology The Third Wave. "For both groups," they write, "the source of poetic production is found in language itself, and it is with this group that, for the first time, the former underground poets have entered into active poetic dialogue . . . in the last few years these contacts have increased as the Soviet poets are actively translating and being translated by their newfound American poetic soulmates."^1^ [2] The new rapprochement between our two poetries has already made a difference, especially on this side of the globe. The influx of energy, enthusiasm, and daring, as well as a new range of source and thematic materials, surely stands behind such recent books as Lyn Hejinian's _Oxota_, a long "novel in verse" on the model of Pushkin's _Evgeni Onegin_ and Clark Coolidge's forthcoming _Russian Nights_. At the same time, the question remains, at least for me, whether the homologies between the two poetries are really as prominent as they are claimed to be. And a related question would be: given the enormous political, social, and cultural differences between our two countries over the past century, and given the long midcentury hiatus of the Stalinist years, which largely suppressed the "Modernism" to which recent developments are supposedly "post," can we expect to find comparable poetic paradigms? [3] Take Dmitri Prigov's discussion of Conceptualism in his manifesto "What more is there to say?" and Mikhail Epstein's elaboration on it, both included in _The Third Wave_. The Conceptual Art movement in the U.S. dates from the late sixties; as Ursula Meyer explains it in the introduction to her handbook by that title: The function of the critic and the function of the artist have been traditionally divided; the artist's concern was the production of the work and the critic's was its evaluation and interpretation. During the past several years a group of young artists evolved the idiom of Conceptual Art, which eliminated this division. Conceptual artists take over the role of the critic in terms of framing their own propositions, ideas, and concepts . . . . An essential aspect of Conceptual Art is its self-reference; often the artists define the intentions of their work as part of their art. Thus, many Conceptual artists advance propositions or investigations. More specifically: the Conceptual art of Joseph Kosuth and Vito Acconci, of Hans Haacke and John Baldessari took up the challenge presented by Duchamp, "preferring the ideational over the visual" and rejecting the notion of a predominantly retinal art, where "meaning" is hidden by a set of visual signs. Art as idea, art as information or knowledge: in practice, this meant that the catalogue could become the exhibition, or indeed, that there would be no exhibition at all, only a series of writings and blueprints. [4] Now compare this aesthetic to Epstein's account: What is conceptualism?. . . . Almost any artistic work . . . is conceptual insofar as there lies within it a certain conception, or the sum of conceptions, which the critic or interpreter draws out. In conceptualism this conception is demonstrably separable from the live artistic fabric and even becomes an independent creation, or "concept" in itself. . . . a "break between the idea and the thing, the sign and reality, is created." And Epstein cites a passage from Dimitri Prigov: The outstanding hero-- He goes forward without fear But your ordinary hero-- He's also almost without fear But first he waits to see: Maybe it'll all blow over And if not-- then on he goes And the people get it all. And he comments: Behind these lines by Dmitri Prigov we easily recognize the formula that lies at the basis of numerous pathetic works about the fearless, all-conquering hero and his slightly backward but devoted comrades in arms. The typical problem with such odic writings is how to reliably hide the formula behind the clothing of linguistic beauty so as to make it frighteningly similar to a live person. The poet-conceptualist, on the other contrary, drags the formula out into the open from the sum of its aesthetic imprintings and changes of form, placing it as an independent fact before the reader's perception. . . . Conceptualism . . . unmask[s] beneath the covering of lyrical soulfulness or epic picturesqueness the skeleton of an idea-engendering construct. (TW 270) For Epstein--and his explanation accords with Prigov's own as well as with Lev Rubinshtein's statement of his "conceptualist" poetics in _The Third Wave_--conceptualism evidently refers to the willingness to reveal the ideological base which a more conventional poetry would try to mask beneath a set of decorative trappings. But ironically, this urge to "expose" the ideologeme and separate it from its material embodiment is almost the antithesis of the conceptualism of our sixties and seventies, which rejected the notion of hidden meaning outright, making the case that psychological depth was itself an anachronism. Whereas American conceptual art was an attack from the Left on the vapidity and "prettiness" of late Abstract Expressionism and color-field painting, the Soviet version is concerned to unmask the "aesthetic imprintings," designed to make Socialist Realist poetry and painting more palatable. Conceptualism, in this sense, is more properly a form of parody or pastiche, a self-conscious mode of satire that takes nothing on faith and is determined to reveal precisely those inner motivations of poetic and artistic discourse that our own Conceptualists have denied existed. [5] The other two movements described by Epstein-- Metarealism and Presentism--pose somewhat different problems for the Anglo-American reader. "Metarealism" (here Epstein includes such poets as Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Nadezhda Kondakova, Viktor Krivulin, Olga Sedakova, and Ivan Zhdanov) is defined as "the pull toward the construction of supertemporal models of reality," the emphasis being on metamorphosis, the process whereby "one thing %becomes% the other." Metarealism, says Epstein "has little in common with surrealism, since it turns not toward the subconscious but to a supraconsciousness" (TW 177). To which Surrealists would respond that in practice, one can't quite separate the two. Indeed, such precursors of surrealism as Rimbaud and Lautreamont made use of precisely the kind of imagery Epstein describes; the passionately erotic, discontinuous, and hallucinatory poetry of Dragomoshchenko, for that matter, immediately brings Rimbaud to mind although there are no doubt important Russian models as well. [6] The third major movement--presentism or the "poetry of presence"--is characterized by its "taste for contemporaneity and the technological plasticity of objects," but without the "social-aesthetic aggressiveness and evangelical utopianism" of futurism (TW 280). "Presentism," writes Epstein, "affirms the presence of an object, its visibility and tangibility, as the necessary and sufficient conditions of its meaningfulness." And his gives the example of Parshchikov's "Catfish," as a phenomenological lyric that tries to capture "the sum total of perceptions: [the catfish] in water and on land, waking and sleeping" (TW 281). [7] I find this account somewhat puzzling because postmodernism is generally characterized as precisely the calling into question of presence, of center, of organic wholeness, and so on. From the late sixties, when Derrida published _Ecriture et difference_, "presence" has been one of those terms whose role is to be negated in favor of its antithesis, "absence." How, then, do we deal with a poetry like Parshchikov's? His own "Conversation between an Editor and a Poet," reprinted in _The Third Wave_, doesn't help us very much. Parshchikov says he "want[s] to be plugged into the search for a new descriptive language," but then adds that "there is no 'old' language, only the discovery of new ways, only the growth of language." And further: "Biochemistry is leading us into a world where the border between the living and the dead is washed away. . . . and so I wrote about the concrete work on earth" (TW 24). [8] Let us look more closely at the poetry itself. Here is "BEGSTVO--II," (the original is represented here by my transliteration), together with Michael Palmer's translation in _The Third Wave_, and the word-for-word translation of Parshchikov's poem by Andrey Patrikeyev: (Peel. Peel i priboy. Myedlenuh, kak smyati pakyet tselofanovi shevelitsuh rasshiryayass zamootnyayetsuh pamyat. Samalyot iz peska snizhayetsuh, takovim nye yavlayayass Vnachalyeh voini mirov kroochye beryot poleen Vpoot' sobirayass, ya chistil ot nassekomikh radyator, kogda novi ogon' spalil puluvinu zemyel', no nass nye nakreel, isskomikh Pepyel byenzozapravki. Peel i priboy. Kroogom nikovo, kromye zaglavshevoso pribora Vsadnik li zdyess myertsal, ili snybeo pyeskom possipali leeneeyu priboya Vrabye blestyat kablooki i zoobi. Tanyets Tyanyetso, slovno bredyen vkogtyakh cherepakhi. Zrya Ya eeshchoo tebya, soboy nye yavlyayass; nass, vozmozhno, rassassivayet zyemla) FLIGHT Michael Palmer Dust. Sea-form and dust. Slowly, the way a crushed cellophane packet stirs and expands, memory blurs. An airplane out of sand descends--not even a plane. At the start of the war of the worlds harsh wormwood takes command. Preparing to set out, I was scraping bugs from the radiator when a new fire torched half the land, seeking but missing us. Gas station's ashes. Sea foam and dust. Nothing around but this control panel in eternal malfunction Was a rider shimmering there, or was sand scattered from the sky along the shoreline ... Flashing teeth and flying heels in the bar. The dance fans out like a seine net in a turtle's claws. In vain I search for you, not knowing who I am Maybe the earth dissolves us. (TW 26) "Begstvo II": Word-for-Word Translation Andrey Patrikeyev (Dust. Dust and the surf. Slowly like the moving crumpled plastic bag the memory expands, getting torrid. A plane made of sand is losing height, without being a plane. The smell of wormwood is more acute at the beginning of the war of the worlds. Getting ready to set off, I was cleaning the radiator from insects when a new fire burned half of the lands, without reaching us whom it sought. The ashes of the petrol station. Dust and surf. All around there is nobody but the instrument (measuring?) that is telling lies without reserve. Was it a rider that glimmered here or was it sand that was strewn over the line of the surf ... Heels and teeth glitter in the bar. The dance is like a drag net stretching in the claws of a tortoise. In vain I'm seeking you without being myself; maybe we are being dissolved by the earth.) [9] Palmer's fine translation, generally quite close to the original (compare it the word-for-word translation by Andrei Patrikeyev), presents us with nature images in collision with those of industrialization gone awry. In this nameless and faceless landscape of "sea-foam and dust" (%peel i priboy%), memory expands like "a crushed cellophane packet," and the "gas station's ashes" cover the sand, which scatters like a mysterious airplane or, in the second stanza, like a "rider shimmering there," with "Flashing teeth and flying heels in the bar." Sea-foam, dust, wormwood, bugs, turtle's claws: these items from the natural world provide a mysterious backdrop, first for the "radiator," from which a "new fire" seems to erupt, "torch[ing] half the land, seeking but missing us," and then in line 9, for the unnamed "instrument" or "measuring" agent--Palmer ominously calls it a "control panel in eternal malfunction." The poem inevitably raises the specter of Chernobyl, although the meaning is not limited to that particular disaster, the imagery conjuring up any number of nightmare visions having to do with fire, earthquake, and apocalypse. Whatever the referent, the poet presents himself as one who can make contact neither with the unnamed "you" nor with himself: the only reality seems to be one of wholesale "dissolution" (%rassassivayet zyemla%). [10] Given its hallucinatory imagery, its lack of specification of "I" and "you," its strange conjunctions of unlike objects--rider with flashing teeth and radiator covered with bugs--it seems quite appropriate to call a poem like "Flight" "meta-realistic" as well as "presentistic." Yet the motive and mode of Parshchikov's poem is, in many ways, quite different from, say, the poetry of his translator Michael Palmer. Here, for example, is the opening of Palmer's "Notes for Echo Lake 1": He says this red as dust, eyes a literal self among selves and picks the coffee up Memory is kind, a kindness, a kind of unlistening, a grey wall even toward which you move. It was the woman beside him who remarked that he never looked anyone in the eye. (This by water's edge.) This by water's edge. And all of the song 'divided into silences', or 'quartered in three silences'. Dear Charles, I began again and again to work, always with no confidence as Melville might explain. Might complain.^2^ [11] Like "Flight" Palmer's "Echo Lake" has references to dust, to water's edge, and to the process of memory, but it is much more dislocated--or more strictly speaking, unlocated than Parshchikov's "Flight." In the latter, the scene, however dream-like, is a constant throughout, even as the positioning of the the poet's "I," however unspecified and generic, is clearly established. This specification is in keeping with the poem's formal structure: four stanzas, each rhyming abab with alternate masculine and feminine rhymes. In Palmer's poem, on the other hand--and this would be equally true for, say, John Ashbery or Lyn Hejinian or Barrett Watten--subjectivity splinters and scenes shift from moment to moment. "The grey wall . . . toward which you move," for example, gives way to "It was the woman," and a declarative sentence like "He never looked anyone in the eye," is followed by the pronomial phrase, "This by water's edge," where "This" has no specific referent. Address too shifts, as we see in the "Dear Charles" passage. Formally, the poem is prose--a fragmentary, gnomic prose that alludes to "events" and "objects" we cannot define, even though "Notes for Echo Lake" is, broadly speaking, a lyric "about" the emptying out of the sign, the search for clues that might connect past to present, that might make sense of memory and desire. [12] To generalize from so few examples is, of course, dangerous, and my aim is by no means to set up some sort of neat presence/ absence dichotomy between our two poetries. But what may be helpful in drawing literary/cultural maps of the postmodern situation is to "thicken the plot," as John Cage would put it, by finding the lacunae in the current narrative. One such link, whether overt or not, is French Modernist poetry, not so much the poetry of Dada or the full-blown Surrealism of Andre Breton or Robert Desnos, as the %poesie brute% ("raw poetry") of Pierre Reverdy, Rene Char and other Modernist poets who came of age after World War I. Indeed, the poetry of Parshchikov, of Dragomoschenko, and other poets of the "Third Wave" seems much more analogous to the intense, elliptical, and mysterious lyric of a Reverdy than to the disillusioned, cool, media-reactive postmodernism of late twentieth-century America. Here, for example, is Reverdy's "Chemin Tournant," which I reproduce in Kenneth Rexroth's translation: It is frightening grey dusty weather A south wind on strong wings Dull echoes of water in the capsizing evening And in the soaking night spouting turning Rough voices complaining A taste of ashes on the tongue The sound of an organ in tbe byways The pitching ship of the heart All the disasters of work When the fires of the desert go out one by one When the eyes drip like blades of grass When the dew falls barefoot on the leaves Morning hardly risen Somebody seeks A lost address on a lost road The stars brighten the flowers tumble down Across the broken branches The dark brook wipes its soft scarce parted lips When the steps of the walker on the counting dial order the movement and crowd the horizon All cries pass and all times meet And me I walk to heaven my eyes in the rays Noise about nothing and names in my head Living faces Everything that has happened in the world And this holiday Where I have lost my time^3^ John Ashbery, in an essay of the sixties, praised Reverdy's poetry for its %transparency%, its presentation of factories and canals as "living phenomena," its "restoration to things of their true name, without the eternal dead weight of symbolism and allegory."^4^ The mysterious presence things assume in Reverdy's poetry ("When the steps of the walker on the counting dial / order the movement and crowd the horizon") is not unlike the mysterious presence, in the middle of Parshchikov's "sea-foam and dust," of a measuring "instrument" or "control panel" that has gone awry. [13] The issue is not, finally, whether Parshchikov knew Reverdy when he wrote his poem or whether the links between them are only coincidental. Rather, I want to suggest--and I made a similar point in the case of Arkadii Dragomoschenko in a recent issue of _Sulfur_^5^-- that as literary and cultural historians, we should try to flesh in the picture, tracing lineages and cultural formations more accurately than we have done to date. Take the simple fact that Ashbery and Palmer, themselves important to Parshchikov, were great disseminators of the French "poetry of presence." Such missing pieces in the coming into being of the postmodern puzzle will help us to define the momentum that has brought the _Third Wave_ brilliantly crashing on our shore. ------------------------------------------------------------ NOTES ^1^ _The Third Wave, The New Russian Poetry_, ed. Kent Johnson and Stephen M. Ashby (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 9. Subsequently cited as TW. ^2^ Michael Palmer, _Notes for Echo Lake_ (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981), 3. ^3^ Pierre Reverdy, "Turning Road," _Selected Poems_, trans. Kenneth Rexroth (New York: New Directions, 1969), 21. ^4^ John Ashbery, "Reverdy en Amerique," _Mercure de France_: Pierre Reverdy Issue, 344 (January/April 1962): 111-12. I reproduce the whole passage and translate the key sentences in _The Poetics of indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage_ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 35-37. ^5^ _Sulfur_ 29 (Fall 1991): 216-21. ------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------ A DRAFT ESSAY ON RUSSIAN AND WESTERN POSTMODERNISM by MIKHAIL EPSTEIN Department of Slavic Languages Emory University _Postmodern Culture_ v.3 n.2 (January, 1993) Copyright (c) 1993 by Mikhail Epstein, all rights reserved. This text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. [This draft essay was circulated during Postmodern Culture's Symposium on Russian Postmodernism. See SYMPOS-1.193 to find where it was included in the discussion. Included here are Epstein's comments introducing the essay. --Ed.] I suggest to your attention some excerpts from my paper on two Russian postmodernisms and their interrelationship with the Western one. The paper was presented at the MLA conference in December 1991, at the same panel with Marjorie Perloff's and Barrett Watten's papers now proposed for this discussion. Also, I will cite several passages from my recent pamphlet (of a very limited circulation) arguing for the purely "ideological," "Eastern" version of postmodernism as opposed to Fredric Jameson's influential theory which connects postmodernism with the economic basis of the "late capitalism" and therefore denies its possibility in non-Western countries (Mikhail Epstein, _Relativistic Patterns in Totalitarian Thinking: An Inquiry into Soviet Ideological Language_. Kennan Institute of Advanced Russian Studies. Occasional Papers, # 243. Washington: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1991). What I am going to say does not reflect latest interesting developments in Russian criticism where the question of "post-modernism" became as focal as the concept of "socialist realism" was in the 1930s (this is not an arbitrary connexion: actually, the later stage of post-modernism comes to succeed the earlier one). In particular, I would like to address you to the articles of Vyacheslav Kuritsyn "Post-modernism: new ancient culture" and Sergei Nosov "Literature and Play," accompanied by editorial comments in _Novyi Mir_ (Moscow), 1992, No.2. pp.225-239. [1] First of all, I want to discuss "the origins and the meaning of Russian postmodernism," taking the idiom from the famous work of Nikolai Berdiaev _The Origins and the Meaning of Russian Communism_ (_Istoki i smysl russkogo kommunizma_, Paris, 1955). Communist teachings came to Russia from Western Europe and seemed at first completely alien to this backward semi-Asiatic country; however Russia turned out to be the first nation to attempt to enact these teachings on a world-wide scale. Berdiaev has shown convincingly that communism was intimately linked to the entire spirit of Russian history long before Russia learned anything about Marxism. [2] The same paradox, in my view, relates to the problem of Russian postmodernism. A phenomenon which seemed to be purely Western, in the final analysis exposes its lasting affinity with some principal aspects of Russian national tradition. [3] Among the different definitions of postmodernism, I would single out as the most important the production of reality as a series of plausible copies, or what the French philosopher Baudrillard calls "simulation." Other features of postmodernism such as the waning of comprehensive theoretical metanarratives or the abolishment of the oppositions between high and low, elitist and mass culture, seem derivative of this phenomenon of hyperreality. Models of reality replace reality itself which therefore becomes irrecoverable. [4] Indeed, the previous dominant trends in Western twentieth century culture such as avant-gardism and modernism were elitist in that they pitted themselves against the reality of mass society either because of an alienation from it (modernism) or because of an effort to transform it in a revolutionary way (avant-gardism). As for metanarratives such as Marxism and Freudianism, their main point was to unmask the illusions of consciousness (ideological perversions) in order to disclose the genuine reality of material production or libidinal energy. [5] Yet once the concept of reality ceases to operate, these metanarratives, which appealed to reality, and elitist arts, which opposed it, begin to wane. [6] The appeal to a reality principle evokes the phenomena of great Western science, philosophy, and technology and thus may be considered the cornerstone of all Western civilization. According to this principle, reality must be distinguished from all products of human imagination and there are practical means which permit the establishment of truth as a form of correspondence between cultural concepts and reality. Science, technology, and even the arts strove to break through different subjective illusions and mythological prejudices to the substance of reality by way of objective cognition, practical utilization, and realistic imitation respectively. The last great metanarratives of Western civilization, those of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, are still penetrated by this obsession with capturing reality and they relentlessly attempt to demystify all illusory products of culture and ideology. [7] During the twentieth century, however, an unexpected twist transformed these highly realistic and even materialistic theories into their own opposites. While Marxism, Freudianism, and Nietzscheanism all appealed to reality as such, they also produced their own highly ideologized and aestheticized realities, and more sophisticated tools of political and psychological manipulation. Reality itself disappeared, yielding to the most refined and provocative theories of realities and, next, to the practical modes of the production of reality. Now in the late twentieth century, what is produced is objectivity itself, not merely separate objects. [8] There are different modes for the production of reality. One is a Soviet-style ideocracy that flourished precisely on the basis of Marxism, which claimed to denounce all ideologies as mystification. Another is an American- style psychosynthesis which includes the comprehensive system of mass media and advertising that flourished precisely on the basis of pragmatism and psychoanalysis, both of which claimed to denounce all illusions of consciousness. [9] In other words, what we now see as reality is nothing more than a system of secondary stimuli intended to produce a sense of reality, or what Baudrillard calls "simulation." In spite of any seeming resemblances, simulation is the opposite of what was understood as imitation during the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. Imitation was an attempt to represent reality as such without any subjective distortions. Simulation is an attempt to substitute for reality those images which appear even more real than reality itself. [10] The production of reality seems rather new for Western civilization, but it was routinely accomplished in Russia throughout its history. Ideas always tended to substitute for reality, beginning perhaps from Prince Vladimir who in 988 adopted the idea of Christianity and implanted it in a vast country in which there was hardly a single Christian. [11] Peter the Great ordered Russia to educate itself and vigorously introduced newspapers, universities, academies. Therefore they appeared in artificial forms, incapable of concealing their deliberateness, the forced order of their origination. Even the first factory in Russia was built not out of some industrial need, but because Czar Anna decided to build a factory to match Western development. In essence, we are dealing with the simulative, or nominative, character of a civilization composed of plausible labels: this is a "newspaper," this--an "academy," this--a "constitution"; but all of this did not grow naturally from the national soil, but was implanted from above in the form of smoothly whittled twigs--perhaps they will take root and germinate. Too much came from the idea, the scheme, the conception, to which reality was subjugated. [12] In his book _Russia in 1839_, Marquis de Coustine expressed this simulative character of Russian civilization in a most insightful manner. "Russians have only names for everything, but nothing in reality. Russia is a country of facades. Read the labels - they have 'society,' 'civilization,' 'literature,' 'art,' 'sciences'--but as a matter of fact, they don't even have doctors. If you randomly call a Russian doctor from your neighborhood, you can consider yourself a corpse in advance."^1^ One can ascribe this negative reaction to a foreigner's malevolence, but Aleksandr Herzen, for one, believed that Marquis de Coustine had written the most fascinating and intelligent book about Russia. This Frenchman had expressed most precisely the simulative character of an entire civilization, in which the plan, the preceding concept, is more real than the production brought forth by that plan. [13] This nominative civilization, composed completely of names,^2^ discloses its nature in Russian postmodernist art, which shows us a label pulled off of emptiness. Conceptualism, the prevailing trend in contemporary Russian art, is a set of labels, a collections of facades lacking the three other sides.^3^ [14] The most grandiose simulacrum that expressed the simulative nature of Russian civilization was, of course, Petersburg itself, erected on a "Finnish swamp." "Petersburg is the most intentional (or imaginary--%umyshlennyi %) and abstract city on earth," wrote Dostoevsky in "The Notes from the Underground": the reality of the city was composed entirely of fabrications, designs, ravings, and visions lifted up like a shadow above a rotten soil unfit for construction. [15] A shakiness was laid into the very foundation of the imperial capital, which subsequently became the cradle of three revolutions. The realization of its intentionality and "ideality," simply not having found firm soil beneath itself, gave rise to one of the first, and most ingenious, literary simulacra--in Dostoevsky: "A hundred times, amidst this fog, I've been struck with a strange but importunate reverie: 'And what, if this fog were to scatter and leave for above, wouldn't this entire rotten, slimy city take off with it, wouldn't it rise up with the fog and disappear like smoke, and the prior Finnish swamp would remain, and, in the middle of it, for beauty, I think, the bronze horseman on his hotly breathing, exhausted horse?'"(_A Raw Youth_, emboldening mine--M. E.).^4^ [16] This vision could have just come off of the canvas of a conceptual artist, a postmodernist master such as Eric Bulatov, for example. Contemporary Russian conceptualism emerged not from the imitation of Western postmodernism, but rather from precisely that Petersburg rotten fog and Dostoevsky's "importunate reverie." Potemkin villages^5^ appears in Russia not simply as a political trick, but as the metaphysical exposure of the fraudulence of any culture or positive activity. It is an outward appearance of a type which almost does not conceal its deceptiveness, but also does not destroy its illusion in a purposeful way, like Hinduist Maya should be destroyed. Rather it is anxious to secure its preservation as an appearance, but in no way prepares to ground or fill it in. The intermediary stratum between "is" and "is not" is that edge along which the "enchanted pilgrimage" of the Russian spirit slides. [17] After the Bolshevik revolution, this simulative nature of reality became even more pronounced. All social and private life was subjugated to ideology, which became the only real force of historical development. Those signs of a new reality of which the Soviets were so proud in the thirties and fifties, beginning with Stalin's massive hydroelectric plant on the Dnieper River and ending with Khrushchev planting of corn and Brezhnev's numerous autobiographies, were actually pure ideological simulations of reality. This artificial reality was intended to demonstrate the superiority of ideas over simple facts. Communist %subbotniks%^6^ in the Soviet Union were examples of hyperevents which simulated "the feast of labor" precisely in order to stimulate real labor. [18] In Baudrillard's definition of this phenomenon of hyperreal: "The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory--PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA--it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable [written by Borges] today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. %The desert of the real itself%."^7^ [19] Anyone who looks at a map of the former Soviet Union today will agree that such a huge country had to arise initially on the map before it could expand in reality. Today we can address this phrase "the desert of the real itself" directly to what has remained from the Soviet Union. This country is originally poor not with commodities, comfort, hard currency, but with reality itself. All shortcomings and deficiencies are only symbols of this fading reality; and symbols themselves comprise the sole reality that survives in this country. [20] To sum up: reality as such gradually disappears throughout Russian history. All reality of pagan Rus' disappeared when Prince Vladimir ordered the introduction of Christianity and briskly baptized the whole nation. Similarly, all reality of Moscow Rus' vanished when Peter the Great ordered his citizens "to become civilized" and shave their beards. All reality of "tsarist" Russia dissolved when Lenin and Bolsheviks transformed it into a launching pad for a communist experiment. Finally, all Soviet reality collapsed in several years of Gorbachev's rule yielding to a new, still unknown system of ideas. Probably, the ideas of capitalist market and free enterprise have now the best chance in Russia, though they remain there once again pure conceptions against the background of hungry and devastated society. Personally I believe that in a long run Eltsin or somebody else will manage to create a sumulacrum of a market for Russia. Realities were produced in Russia out of the ruling elite's minds, but once produced they were imposed with such force and determination that these ideological constructions became hyperrealities. * * * [21] Almost all investigators of postmodernism cite America as a wonderland in which fantasies become more real than reality itself. In this sense, however, America is not alone. Russia, as distinct from Europe, also developed as a realized dream. It is true that the postmodernist self- awareness of Soviet reality emerged later than parallel philosophical developments in the West. Nevertheless, already in the mid-seventies, so-called conceptual art and literature became more and more popular in the Soviet Union, suggesting a comprehensive reconsideration of the entire phenomenon of Soviet civilization. As distinct from realistic literature of the Solzhenitsyn type, conceptualism does not attempt to denounce the lie of Soviet ideology (from false ideas to a genuine reality). As distinct from metaphysical poetry of the Brodsky type, it does not turn away from Soviet reality in search of higher and purer worlds (from false reality to genuine ideas). Conceptual painting and writing, as presented by Ilya Kabakov, Erick Bulatov, Dmitry Prigov, Vsevolod Nekrasov, Lev Rubinstein, Vladimir Sorokin, convey ideas as the only true substance of the Soviet lifestyle. Paradoxically, false ideas comprise the essence of genuine reality. [22] The erasure of metanarrative is another important feature of postmodernism that is worthy of explanation. In the Soviet case, it is an indisputably Marxist metanarrative. There is a common, though fallacious, belief that only under and after perestroika, have Marxist teachings begun to dissolve into a variety of ideological positions. In truth, this dissolution began at the very moment when Marxism was brought to Russia and further progressed when it turned into Marxism-Leninism and Soviet Marxism. [23] Perhaps more than other metanarratives, Marxism relies on reality and materiality as the determinant of all ideological phenomena. When this teaching came to a culture in which reality had always been a function of powerful State imagination, a strange combination emerged: materialism as a form and tool of ideology. Paradoxically, Marxism was a catalyst for this transformation of Russia into one great Disneyland, though one less amusing than terrifying. Before the Bolshevik revolution, not all aspects of material life were simulated and some place remained for genuine economic enterprises. But now that Russian ideology has assimilated materialism, all material life has become a product of ideology. [24] Marxist teachings themselves also suffered a paradoxical transformation. On the one hand, Marxism became the only theoretical viewpoint that was officially allowed by the Soviet regime. For this very reason, it ironically grew to include all other possible viewpoints. Internationalists and patriots, liberals and conservatives, existentialists and structuralists, technocrats and ecologists all pretended to be genuine Marxists, pragmatically adapting the "proven teaching" to changing circumstances. In the West, Marxism preserved its identity as a metanarrative, giving its own specific interpretation of all historical phenomena because it was freely challenged by other metanarratives (such as Christianity and Freudianism). In the Soviet Union, however, Marxism became what postmodernists call pastiche, an eclectic mixture of all possible interpretations and outlooks. As an all- encompassing doctrine penetrating into physics and theater, military affairs and children's play, Soviet Marxism was the ultimate achievement of postmodernism. [25] In Western society, postmodernism is often regarded as a continuation of the logic of "late capitalism," a condition in which all ideas and styles acquire the form of commodities and become "manageable" and "changeable." In the Soviet Union, postmodern relativity of ideas arises from its own ideological, not economic, base. All those concepts previously alien to the essence of communist ideology, such as "private property" and the "free market," are now freely entering this ideological space, stretching it beyond its limits--allowing the ideology to embrace its own opposite. This is a process of de-ideologization, but not in the sense of Daniel Bell's understanding of the phenomenon in his famous book, _The End of Ideology_. In the Soviet Union, de-ideologization means the end of the "particular" ideology which originally had a definite class character, social ideals, and aimed to inspire the proletariat to launch a socialist revolution and construct communism. The current de-ideologization of Marxism in the USSR is a process of the universalization of ideological thinking as such, its final move from the realm of militant modernism to a more playful, relaxed, postmodern mentality. [26] This de-ideologization, or super-ideologization, of Soviet Marxism raises a vital question: are there two distinct postmodernisms, one Western and one Eastern, or is there a single, shared postmodernism? The best answer, in the author's view, is that "one-and-a-half" postmodernisms exist. The postmodern condition is essentially the same in the East and West, although it proceeds from opposite foundations: ideology and economics, respectively. Late capitalism and late communism are polar opposites in terms of economic structure and efficiency, but economics alone does not determine culture as a whole. The fundamental underlying patterns of cultural postmodernism in the East are not economic, they are ideological. Communism has proved to be a more radical challenge to capitalism than was originally thought, not only did it change the mode of production, it changed the relationship of base and superstructure in society.^8^ [27] A comparison of capitalist economics* and communist ideology* is imperative for elucidating the postmodernist traits common to both societies. Such a "cross" examination would be more interesting than a parallel comparison; if one compares communist and bourgeois ideologies, or socialist and capitalist economics, little can be found beyond commonplace oppositions. It is far more relevant--even from a Marxist-Leninist perspective--to examine the common ground between communist ideology and capitalist economics, as the two perform identical functional roles in their respective social structures. The circulation of goods in capitalist society is essentially identical to the circulation of ideas in communist society. Ideology, like capital, allows for the growth of surplus value, or, in this case, surplus evaluation. In a communist society, every concrete fact of the "material" world is treated ideologically, as evidence of some general historic tendency--its significance increases from one instance of ideological interpretation to the next. [28] The famous formula of a capitalist economy which Marx suggested in _Das Kapital_ is "commodities--money--commodities," or "money--commodities--money." The same formula can be applied in modified form to the ideology of Soviet Marxism: "reality - idea - reality," or "idea - reality - idea." Facts are exchanged for ideas in communist society in the same way as goods are exchanged for money in capitalist societies. Ideas, as a sort of currency, acquire an abstract form of "ideological capital." They do not constitute material wealth, but the "correctness" of communist ideology. This "correctness," or absolute truth, compensates people for their labor ("heroic deeds and sacrifices"), as well as recoups the cost of so-called "particular" mistakes resulting from Party policy. [29] What happens in the late stage of communist development? Why does it move toward a "postmodernist condition" along the same path followed by "late capitalist" societies? Totalitarianism was a superlative machine for accumulating and exploiting all sorts of ideas: leftist and rightist, revolutionary and conservative, internationalist and patriotic, etc.. However, this machine spawned a phenomenon bigger than itself. Just as capital eventually outgrows the capitalist "machine" and becomes a self- sufficient entity, Soviet ideological capital has outgrown the "machine" of a particular personality or system of ideas and has become an omnipresent mentality, appropriating any fact to serve any idea. Such is the current state of Soviet society under %glasnost'%. Marxist ideology, the most powerful of all modern ideologies, is losing its identity and becoming only one possible interpretation of reality (in the Soviet Union, it would be the least probable one!). The expansion of Marxist ideology overcame Marxism as a form of modernity and created the postmodern condition in the USSR. [30] The overarching expansion of Soviet ideology occurred in the Brezhnev era, when the difference between facts and ideas was practically erased. Ideology was gradually transformed from a system of ideas into an all-encompassing ideological environment which retained all possible alternative philosophical systems as latent components within itself. Existentialism and structuralism, Russophilism and Westernism, technocratic and ecological movements, Christian and neo-pagan outlooks--everything was compressed into the form of Marxism, creating a sort of post-modernist pastiche. [31] One can easily anticipate a counter-argument: how can we refer to Soviet postmodernism without a clear identification of Soviet modernism? Western postmodernism came after modernism, so where is the corresponding progression in Soviet culture? [32] It is obvious, however, that Russian culture of the pre-revolutionary period was predominantly modernist as such trends as symbolism and futurism indicate. As expressions of a highly utopian vision, the Bolshevik movement and October revolution also can be seen as modernist phenomena. The same rigidly consistent style of modernist aesthetics was dominant in the twenties as Mayakovsky's and Pilnyak's works demonstrate. [33] In this sense, socialist realism may be regarded as an essentially postmodernist trend destined to balance all opposites and to create a new space for the interaction of all possible stylistic devices including Romantic, Realist, and Classicist models. Andrei Siniavsky's dissident interpretation (in a 1960 famous essay "On Socialist Realism") of Soviet official literature as of a reborn classicism was one-sided, as were more conformist attempts to describe socialist realism in terms of amplified critical realism, or heroic romanticism, or combination of both. Socialist realism was not a specific artistic direction in a traditional or modernist sense, it can be adequately approached only as a postmodernist phenomenon, as an eclectic mixture of all previous classical styles, as an encyclopedia of literary cliches. We should trust more to social realism's own self-definition: the unity of a method attained through the diversity of styles (or their mixture, or pastiche). "Socialist realism is regarded as a new type of artistic consciousness which is not limited by the framework of one or even of several modes of representation...."^9^ Socialist realism simulated successfully all literary styles beginning from ancient epic songs and ending with Tolstoy's refined psychologism and futuristic poetics of a placard and a slogan. [34] The epoch of the thirties through fifties in the Soviet Union was clearly post*modernist, even though the prevailing term at the time was "anti*modernism." The furious struggle against "rotten bourgeois modernism" became the hall-mark of Stalinist aesthetics. What was antimodernism in relation to the West was postmodernism in relation to the native, pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary modernist culture. [35] In the sixties and seventies, another wave of modernism came into Soviet literature: futurist, surrealist, abstractionist and expressionist trends were revived in literature, painting, and music. The twenties became the nostalgic model for this neo-modernism of the sixties as presented in Andrei Voznesensky and Vasily Aksyonov. [36] This explains why later, in the seventies and eighties, another wave of postmodernism arose in opposition to this sixties "neo-modernist" generation. For such postmodernists as Ilya Kabakov, Boris Grois, or Dmitri Prigov there are no figures more adversarial, than Malevich, Khlebnikov, and other modernists of the early 20th century, not speaking about the latter's successors in the sixties such as Andrei Voznesensky or Vassily Aksyonov. Consequently, this postmodern generation feels a sort of nostalgia precisely for the typical Soviet lifestyle and the art of social realism which provides them with congenial ideological material for their conceptual works. Social realism is close to conceptualism in its antimodernist stance: they share highly conventional semiotic devices, the sets of cliches and idioms that are devoid of any personal emphasis and intentional self-expression. [37] These components of the postmodernist paradigm, which in the West were introduced simultaneously, took much longer to mature in Soviet culture. The erasing of the semantic difference between idea and reality, between the signifying and the signified, had been achieved by the first Soviet postmodernism (socialist realism); while the syntactic interplay of these signs was aesthetically adopted only by the second postmodernism (conceptualism). Although it would seem that these two processes must coincide, it took several decades for Soviet culture to pass from one stage to another. [38] The point is that Western culture has great respect for reality that is beyond signs. As soon as signs proved to be self-sufficient, they immediately acquired a playful dimension. The Russian cultural tradition is much more inclined to view signs as an independent reality deserving of the greatest esteem. Therefore it was extremely difficult to accept that these signs which substitute for reality may become objects of irony and aesthetic play. [39] Western postmodernism includes two aspects: what can be called the substance of postmodernism, and the interpretation of this substance in postmodernist conceptual framework. In the Soviet Union, these two aspects developed separately. The period from the thirties to the fifties witnessed the emergence of postmodernism as a specific substance, including the ideological and semiotic dissolution of reality, the merging of elitist and mass culture into mediocrity, and the elimination of modernist stylistic purity and refinement. Only in the late fifties, in the works of such poets as Kholin, Kropivnitsky, Vsevolod Nekrasov, Vilen Barsky, and then in the seventies, in the works of Ilya Kabakov, Eric Bulatov, Dmitri Prigov, and Lev Rubinstein, was the "substantial" postmodernism of Soviet culture interpreted precisely in postmodernist terms. Signs of heroic labor, collectivism, the striving for a communist future, and so on which previously were perceived seriously as the signified reality itself, now were perceived only at the level of signs themselves, which are susceptible to all sorts of linguistic games. In the 1980s Soviet postmodernism finally overtook its second aspect and bloomed into a full cultural phenomenon comparable with its Western parallel. [40] Certainly, such postmodernist phenomena as Borges's stories, Nabokov's and Umberto Eco's novels or Derrida's models of deconstruction have had a considerable influence on some contemporary schools of Soviet writing, including conceptualism and metarealism. What is much more striking, however, is that the earlier Soviet post- or antimodernism still influences, though unconsciously, the contemporary American literary scene. For example, Tom Wolfe's recent manifesto "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast"^10^ gained much attention with his attacks against modernism and his calls for a social novel which would combine fiction and reporting. Wolfe involuntarily duplicates the very patterns that Stalin's ideologists used in their relentless political tirades against Russian pre-revolutionary and Western bourgeois modernism. Wolfe probably has never heard of Zhdanov's infamous 1946 report debasing Akhmatova and Zoshchenko, let alone read it. Nevertheless, Wolfe's main points and even his choice of metaphors are the same as Zhdanov's: they both compare writing to engineering, for example. Wolfe also proposes that writers form brigades to pool their talents for an investigation of the amazing social reality in the United States, as it was in the Soviet Union of 1930's.^11^ [41] I do not go so far as to suggest that the aesthetic code of Stalinism directly influenced such an "antimodernist" writer as Tom Wolfe. Yet the terms of postmodernist debate apply equally well in such embarrassingly different conditions as the U.S.S.R. in the late forties and the U.S. in the late eighties. The striving for a postmodernist world view inevitably brings about an opposition to the abstractness and individualism of modernist writing; it also causes a turn towards common and stereotyped forms of language as imposed by the dominant social order. [42] In a broader perspective, postmodernism can be seen as a type of culture which was developed in both the West and the Soviet Union, although by different methods. The Western version of postmodernism came chronologically later, though it was much more theoretically self-conscious. To try to isolate and identify a Western-style postmodernism in twentieth century Russian culture proved to be a difficult problem because the formation of specifically Russian postmodernism had been divided into two periods. [43] The development of Russian modernism was artificially stopped in the thirties, while in the West it developed smoothly up to the sixties. This accounts for the existence of a single postmodernism in the West, while two separate postmodernisms arose in Soviet culture, in the thirties and in the seventies. This obliges us to compare not only Russian postmodernism with its Western counterpart, but also to examine the two Russian postmodernisms: socialist realism and conceptualism. Perhaps, it is the chronological gap between them that made both versions so ideologically charged, though in two opposite directions. The first postmodernism is explicitly heroic, the second one is implicitly ironic. Nevertheless, if we identify them as two aspects and two periods of one historical phenomenon, these opposite tenets easily neutralize each other, comprising entirely "blank pastiche," to use Fredric Jameson's definition of postmodernism. [44] The tendency to perceive socialist realism and conceptualism as mutually s/t/imulating aspects of the same cultural paradigm presumably will get further support in the course of future reinterpretations of Soviet history in terms of its integrity and the interdependence of its "initial" and "conclusive" phases. Two Russian postmodernisms complement each other and present a more complicated and self-contradictory phenomenon than Western postmodernism which is concentrated in a single period of history. ----------------------------------------------------------- NOTES ^1^ Marquis de Coustine, _Nikolaevskaia Rossiia_. Moscow: Izdatel'stvo obshchestva politkatorzhan, 1930, p. 79. ^2^ Is it not this "nominativity," this pure concern with names, that gives rise to the sinister power of the %nomenklatura%, that is those people selected by no one and by no means meriting their stature, but who are named "secretary," "director," or "instructor" and have received power by virtue of these names. ^3^ On contemporary Russian Conceptualism see Mikhail Epstein "After the Future: On the New Consciousness in Literature," _The South Atlantic Quarterly,_ Spring 1991, v.90, no.2, pp.409-444, and Mikhail Epstein, "Metamorphosis: On New Currents in the Soviet Poetry." _Third Wave: The New Russian Poetry._ Ed. Kent Johnson and Stephen M. Ashby. University of Michigan Press, 1991, pp. 382-407. ^4^ Dostoevsky has several variations on the theme of this vision, which affected him deeply, in _A Weak Heart_(1848), in _Petersburg Dreams in Verse and in Prose_(1861), and in the sketches for _The Diary of a Writer_(1873). ^5^ Dummy villages erected, according to foreigners, by the order of Prince Potemkin along the route he was to take with Catherine II after the annexation of the Crimea, 1783. This expression is used allusively of something done for show, an ostentatious display designed to disguise an unsatisfactory state of affairs, a pretence that all is well, etc. See _Russian-English Dictionary of Winged Words_, Moscow: Russkii iazyk, 1988, p.162. ^6^ Voluntary unpaid work on days off, originally on Saturdays. ^7^ J. Baudrillard. _The Precession of Simulacra_. Semiotexte: New York, 1983, 2. ^8^ For a critical discussion of this issue, see the chapter entitled "Basis and Superstructure: Reality and Ideology," in Marcuse, _Soviet Marxism_, 106-107. ^9^ _Literaturnyi entsiklopedicheskii slovar'_. Moscow: Sovetskaiia entsiklopediia, 1987, p.416. ^10^ Tom Wolfe. "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast. A literary manifesto for the new social novel." _Harper's_ November 1989. ^11^ These issues are discussed at length in my article "Tom Wolfe and Social(ist) Realism." _Common Knowledge_, Oxford University Press, 1992, v. 1, No. 2, pp. 147-160.